Mortal Sin by Laurie Breton Read Free Book Online

returning at last to the table with a number of familiar items as well as tidbits from several new dishes she’d never tried before. She slid into the red vinyl booth and eyed his heaping plate in astonishment.
    “What?” he said.
    “How can you eat like that and stay so thin? There’s not an ounce of fat on you.”
    He picked up the chopsticks the waiter had left beside his plate and removed them from their paper wrapper. “I have an active metabolism. I could eat all day and not gain weight.”
    “If I ate like that,” she said, “I’d weigh six hundred pounds.” She watched his expertise with the chopsticks, eyed the matching pair by her plate, and opted for her fork. “You maneuver those things as if you know what you’re doing.”
    “I spent a couple of years in Hong Kong.”
    “For the Church?” She nibbled a bite of broccoli.
    He lifted his teacup, sipped, shook his head. “Before I entered the seminary.” He set down the tea and picked up the newspaper he’d dropped on the seat beside him. “Are you familiar with the
Phoenix
?”
    “No. What’s the
Phoenix
?”
    “Back in the early days, it used to be called an underground newspaper. Now the fever of political correctness has changed the term to alternative. It’s aimed primarily at the college crowd. There’s some pretty good journalism, a lengthy arts section—reviews of movies and theater and music and gallery exhibits. And then—” he opened it up, pulled out the innermost section and handed it to her “—there’s this.”
    The black-and-white cover photo showed a man and a woman in a mildly suggestive pose. Inside, she found a soup-to-nuts menu of erotic pleasures, categorized for easy reference. Adult personals. Commercial ads for phone sex, exotic dance clubs, sex toys, XXX-rated book and video stores. Grainy photos of huge-breasted women with only the most crucial areas covered. Classified ads for everything from massage and escort services to fantasy and fetish. Spanking. Domination.
Hot young girls want it tonight
.
    “Lord love a duck.” She paged through it in horrified fascination. “Forgive me for sounding naive, but isn’t most of this stuff illegal?”
    He swallowed a mouthful of food and waved his hand in a
comme ci, comme ca
gesture. “It’s a gray area. Most of it skirts the edges of the law. Pornography—books, magazines, videos—isn’t necessarily illegal. Depending, of course, on local ordinances. Any business that defines itself as an escort service or a massage parlor is in the clear unless you can prove the exchange of money for sexual gratification. And phone sex is an even more shadowy area. Because there’s no actual physical contact, nobody can seem to decide whether or not it’s prostitution. For the most part, the police look the other way. The consensus seems to be that it’s a victimless crime.” He set down his fork, took a sip of tea. “As you can see, sex is big business.”
    “I always thought of Boston as staid and reserved. Beacon Hill, old money, and all that.”
    “This city was settled by Puritans. It’s been nearly four hundred years, and still we keep our vices well hidden. Don’t get me wrong—we have plenty of vices. We just don’t wave our dirty linens in front of the world. Welcome to Boston.”
    She folded up the newspaper. “I assume, Father, that you had some reason for showing me this. Other than shocking me.”
    “Have I shocked you?”
    “Not particularly. I’m thirty-three years old. I’ve been married and divorced three times. I haven’t lived under a rock.”
    He raised an eyebrow and studied her with keen interest. “Three times,” he said.
    “That doesn’t mean I’m a floozy.”
    A smile played about the corner of his mouth. “The thought never crossed my mind.”
    “What it does mean,” she said, “is that I have lousy taste in men. I have good intentions, but poor judgment. And why am I telling you this, anyway? I don’t even know you, and